Gun Control

I have been hearing so much about gun control that its beginning to become obnoxious. First of all countries that use gun control have less gun deaths than countries that do not. So many would say that it is proven gun control works. I have to agree. I do not have any idea what conservatives are thinking when they say arming everyone would decrease crime/gun deaths. People get in fights all the time, humans act irrational, we make mistakes, so why would we give all of them a gun?

Unfortunately where we are at in the U.S. we could not completely get rid of guns. There are just too many of them. So what we have accomplished in my opinion is a victory. However we will always have those people who assume that the second amendment only says the right to bear arms. Too often pro gun advocates do not know the full text of the second amendment. the full text is "A well regulated milita, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms, shall not be infringed". Notice the words well regulated and necessary for the security of a free state. The second amendment does not give people the right to bear arms at all, yet people still interpret it to be that way.

Now using this argument I can already hear pro gun people say "Dirty liberal" or "Crazy progressive". Well they can say these and try to insult me any way they want but the facts are the facts. Gun control is the most affective way to decrease attacks using firearms. My favorite quote to prove such a fact is from a tv show called "The West Wing". In this there is a debate between a senator and one of the presidents assistants over gun control. Here is the text. "But I do know that if you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Australia, you've got a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year and they had 112. Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or do you think it's because those guys have gun control laws?"

"Liberal Tax"

So as I was doing my local scan of ksl.com today I came upon a story titled, "Liberal tax leaves bitter taste in some smoothie drinkers' mouths". I thought to myself liberal tax? what's liberal tax? It turns out that an owner of a smoothie shop is going to charge liberals more for a smoothie. I understand that Utah is highly conservative but charging a certain political party more for what they believe is disgusting. What is the difference between this scenario and charging a certain religion more for a smoothie? In both cases someone is getting charged more because of what they believe. The United States is soon going to encounter serious problems if we continue the direction we are going. We are in major amounts of debt (some of which caused by a couple of wars that the U.S. didn't have the money to pay for), we have major differences in our political parties making it impossible for us to pass any bills to help our country out of debt, and if we don't find a solution soon we as citizens are going to face the major problem of hyper inflation. If we look at the history of the world another country has faced these same problems. France had all of these problems just before they had there revolution. I don't want the United States to have a revolution but if we continue to have political parties do things like charge a "Liberal Tax" than we will have these exact same problems. The U.S. is in a war but it is not a war of fighting it is a war of ideas. The more these ideas clash the bigger problems we will have.

How Long Will The Electoral College Last

After this years elections there has been some dispute about the Electoral College. Let me start out by saying what the Electoral College is and how it works. The founding fathers established the process of the Electoral College in the Constitution. What happens is each party elects a certain number of "electors". Then when the elections takes place the party with the majority vote, from each state, will send their electors. This process seems quite complicated, however it really is simple. Let me use an example. California has 55 electoral votes. So each party during their caucuses will elect 55 electors that agree with the common view of the party. When the actual election takes place the population of California will vote for president. This years results for California were Obama: 59.3%, Mitt Romney: 38.4%, and Other: 2.4%. So Obama won the majority vote in California meaning that the electors elected by the Democratic Party will be able to submit their vote to Washington DC. Every election there are 538 electoral college votes. Meaning that to win through majority you must receive 270 votes.

Now the problem with this system is quite often it does not properly represent the people of the United States. There have been instances when the candidate that won majority vote does not get elected president. This recent election was close when it came to majority vote but Obama pulled ahead at the end. However many saw that Mitt Romney had the majority vote when Obama was elected president. This caused a bit of an uprising. Former candidate Donald Trump said, "The electoral college is a disaster foar a democracy". It seems to me that with the technology we have now the electoral college should become a thing of the past. Now that voting is done electronically we don't have to hand count each vote. For a country that says it is run by the people for the people it seams the people have very little power

(Attached is a link that will lead you to a website that has electoral college by state)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html